Thursday, March 29, 2012

That Wistful Feeling (Mass Effect)

Note: While I do discuss my feelings about the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, this post contains no spoilers. I make no such voucher for any comments that may or may not be left.

When I walked out of the last Lord of the Rings movie, I had a feeling that I seldom got from a movie but frequently got from books - that utterly satisfied and yet nostalgic feeling of ending.



Wednesday, March 28, 2012

From the archives: Fionnuala


This is a character background I wrote for AllianceLARP SF.


Python Game Project


Currently working on learning some Python, both for my own interest and in hopes that it will prove useful in my career. I decided to start out working on a kind of old school text adventure game. The project is both fun and interesting and already I've learned quite a few things (aside from the little bit of Python that I've learned from it).

  • Everything that everyone tells you about learning to code is true: you learn more if you have a project you are working on. There are several reasons for this, motivation being the least of them; the biggest reason, in my opinion, is that having a project in mind will push you to stretch the limits of what you know and try new things. 
  • The guys who wrote the classic text adventure games were amazingly talented writers. It is really hard to make a game interesting when you are limited to text to convey everything. I'm doing text as a placeholder, but even so, it's hard to strike the balance between evocative and tl;dr.
  • The more details you have fleshed out about your setting & characters, even if you don't convey 90% of it in-game, the richer your game will be. I started out with a seed idea and haven't really done a lot of world building yet, and it shows.
I'm pleased with the amount of progress I've made in a short period of time and I'm looking forward to continuing to work on it. Right now my goal isn't really to necessarily make something that I can share but mostly to explore some ideas and gain some knowledge of Python; if I do decide to share some of it I'll post it here.

The main resources I've been using for this project have been reddit/gamedev and the tutorials at http://inventwithpython.com.